The third way your website can help your business is that it allows you to create entirely new products or services. This opens up new revenue streams that may not depend at all on any business you get based in your local geographic area. One of the best ways to find opportunities here is to employ what Tom Peters calls managed asset reflation.
Managed asset reflation is taking some process, system, platform, tool, or service your company has created for its own internal use and reselling it as a product or service to others. Specifically, you add tremendous value to this endeavor by creatively leveraging your core competencies.
Here’s an example: A typical small business HVAC contractor (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) needs to have a process for tracking work and sales. Once an HVAC provider reaches a certain size (and it doesn’t take long!) this should become computerized, if not downright web-ified. The HVAC provider’s brass will probably look into available software and its costs vs. the idea of paying for custom programming. The second options sounds like it would be more expensive, but not necessarily! You could use sources like Rent-A-Coder or hire permanently whoever builds your application. The application works well and the brass feels it gives them a definite edge over the local competition, so they continue to enjoy the benefits of it. For most businesses, that would be the end of the story.
The HVAC company has a website just like everybody else does. And just like everybody else’s, it’s hardly more than an electronic brochure, in spite of the sophisticated computerized monitoring systems now available for HVAC installations. Who knows what you’re paying for that website’s continued drain on your bottom line. So, you’ve got this great custom HVAC work scheduling and sales application and you have a website. People buy things on the web. Specifically, they research and buy software on the web.
This is a golden opportunity! The HVAC company gets with the original programmer(s) and rehires them to create a version that can be downloaded, installed, and configured. They hire someone to write a manual (in plain English, please). They pick the top salespeople and hand them a new mission: sell this software to other HVAC companies, and for as much as anyone’s willing to pay! How much? In excess of several thousand dollars, probably. This stuff ain’t cheap!
Even if the local economy tanks and the building/maintenance market dries up, there are thousands of other HVAC companies across the globe that are not direct competition with our little scrappy, tech-savvy HVAC company. Not only can they sell the software, but also the training and support contracts that go with it! The sales could be so tremendous they’d have to hire new people and create a new division!
There are other benefits to this idea, as well. In any industry, there are trade publications and companies considered to be industry leaders. Managed asset reflation can help get you written up in those trade publications. It can help propel you above the heads and shoulders of your local competition.
The benefits of using the internet are not additive—they are exponentially multiplicative. You can transform your dull “brochureware” website into a money-making powerhouse! It will not be easy, nor will it be cheap, but the rewards are worth it.
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Reimagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age is without question one of my favorite business books of all time! I liked it so much I couldn’t keep it to myself and gave it to my boss (I don’t think she’s read it yet! 
). What you will read in here will sometimes shock you and you’d be tempted to disbelieve half of it (but his numbers and research are spot-on). What you will learn in here will enable you to move forward with the times and become immensely profitable.
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